Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

May 31, 2007

Mahalo, which means 'thank you' in Hawaiian (all well and good, but how is it pronounced?) has just launched in Alpha mode. Danny has a good write up of it over at Search Engine Land, so I'm adding my two pennies worth over here. The idea behind Mahalo is that human beings are helping to craft the answers you get. They're hoping to cover 25,000 top search terms - so far they have done about 4,000 and they're doing about 125 a day with a view to getting that up to about 200 a day.

Now, when you do a search, and I tried one on Martin Luther King you get various results back for you to look at. There's the Mahalo Top 7, blogs and articles, biographies, a timeline, organizations, videos, audio archives, historical writings, photo galleries (way down the page!), criticism, merchandise and related searches. Next to certain results are icons to indicate that it's a 'Guide's Choice' or a warning. There are 26 (count them) different warnings. These cover things such as auto playing music, ad heavy, not safe for work to the rather more insane 'ugly site'. I was a bit taken aback by the 'portions in foreign language' warning. I guess that means anything that isn't American then. Well, good to see the bias coming out early.

Over on the right is a guide note with fast facts, and the ability to email the page to someone. Users can also recommend links as well, which are checked by 'the experts' before they are included. If you run a search for something that they've not yet done an expert search on Mahalo links directly into Google. Yes... the experts, or more accurately as far as Mahalo is concerned, 'guides'. Well, you get to see who has hand crafted the result that you're looking at. Rupak did the one for the MLK result. Rupak is 'an actor and graduate of Harvard'. As well as being a guide on MLK, he's also pretty fluent on such diverse subjects as Bill Gates, Las Vegas Hotels, Madrid Hotels, Moscow restaurants, Johnny Depp, the South African National Football team, and 200 other results.

Now, I really don't want to criticise Rupak - I'm sure he's a great guy, clever and knows about a lot of stuff. However, am I going to trust his work? I have very little to go on, other than his site and IMDb entry. The list of stuff that he's written results for really make me think that he's done so because he likes or has an interest in those subjects. Not that they're in the top 25,000 or so results. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice here, but would YOU expect the 'South African National Football Team' to be a subject that high up in the listings? No. Neither do I. So what's the *real* criteria here? Makes you wonder a bit. Moreover, and again no criticism of Rupak, but you're not going to get someone that expert in that many subject areas, particularly ones that are so diverse. Not a real issue if it's finding out about Johnny Depp, but for something more serious - I'm just not going to go there. I'll stick with rather more reputable sources, like the Librarians' Internet Index.

Another concern here is that these queries are relatively speaking small in number. I had to try quite hard to come up with one that actually worked (rather than default to one of the examples on the screen). No, not even the good old standby 'internet'. There isn't an answer for 'internet'! Not actually that surprising really, because it's a huge subject area. So you'd expect to narrow that down by adding in some more search terms. Except... that doesn't work. Martin Luther King as a search does just fine. Martin Luther King birthday gives you an 'oops! We haven't hand-written a result page..' Now c'mon guys... you can't tell me that you're not clever enough to work out what to do in that situation. What it means of course is that I have to do the exact opposite of what I should do when I'm searching, and think more broadly in the hope of hitting lucky. Once again the user is at the mercy of the search engine, which isn't a step forward. If I need to go to Google to get the results, why don't I just do that in the first place? Calacanis is going to tell me that I should continue to go to Google for the long tail results, but visit his search engine for more indepth stuff on the things that are popular, to get specialised answers.

Except that I'm not going to get specialised answers. I'm going to get stuff on Lost, or Paris Hilton, or Disney World, or Pizza. All well and good, but it's not exactly cutting edge stuff here is it?

Mahalo isn't the only search engine doing this sort of thing. Bessed does it as well. Have to say that impresses me even less than Mahalo - my MLK search brings up 'Jewelry Making' as the first result. Admittedly 'Lost' gives me the TV series as the first answer, with 46 sites listed, together with the ability to leave comments and add in more results. I'd say that Mahalo comes out slightly better with the options that it provides for me. (As an aside, the guide that wrote the answer to Lost has also written an answer for Lost characters. This is, to my mind, increasingly becoming a joke. Sure, 'Lost characters' is a related search for the 'Lost' search, but I've got to either search for that, OR the names of the actors, but NOT the names of the characters themselves. This isn't a search engine - it's looking for a needle in a haystack!)

If I want human intervention I think that for the time being I'll stay with the tried and trusted - LII and virtual libraries listed at Pinakes. They at least know what they're doing. I'm not yet confident enough to say that Mahalo does.

Over at Google Image Search you can now specify that you just want faces. Very clunky though - you have to type in &imgtype=face at the end of the URL. A simple button would suffice guys! Exalead added this functionality a while back in their Image search offering as one of the refinement features. Have to say though, the Google offering does seem to provide more and better results, even though it's clunky.

There's an absolutely stinging attack over at The Register having a go at Ask.com's bogus Information Revolution. While I think the search engine is great (specifically the Ask X version) the advertising campaign is an awful decision. I have discussed it in some detail over in my latest Ariadne column and in short I think it's a retrograde step that will do the search engine more harm than good - AND in the short term as well.

One Register comment is "the Information Revolution posters are like a suburban uncle who turns up to a fancy-dress party dressed as Rambo." That really should sting, and if it makes Ask think again about this dreadful campaign, then I hope that it does. Ask is just beginning to get over the obstacles caused by the stupid butler concept, introducing good functionality, doing lots of good stuff, innovating and growing, and now it looks like they're stumbling down another cul de sac. Please Ask, just dump the Information Revolution campaign, and concentrate on telling people that you've got a good search engine.

Well, the hysteria over at LiveJournal seems to have finally caught on with SixApart (the guys that run it), since they have finally got a news update titled 'Well we really screwed this one up' in which they explain what they did wrong, how they're fixing it, what they were trying to do. Seems a reasonable response, particularly when some LJ users are throwing around 'Nazi' terminology at them. There's also an article over at C|Net that talks about this as well, if you're interested. While in some respects it's a bit of a storm in a teacup it is another example of the power that users have over systems, which in many respects is just another illustration of Web 2.0 in action.

All does not appear to be bright and rosy in the land that is LiveJournal.com. Apparently some people are getting very upset over the way LJ is handling a delicate issue. It seems that some LJ users who have expressed interests in things such as rape or incest or child abuse etc are having their accounts closed. Irrespective of the type of interest - it may be as a survivor of one of these awful things. LJ doesn't appear to be giving users a chance to defend themselves, they're just hacking their way through the system.

Consequently some users are getting very upset, changing their interests to just read 'freedom of speech' and others are leaving and so on.

There's right and wrong on both sides, as far as I can tell, not having got the absolute truth out of the situation. I think LJ is handling this whole thing terribly badly, but then so did digg recently - just because people can write good software it doesn't mean that they're actually any good with dealing with people. Quite the opposite in my experience. Equally however, people are talking about defending freedom of speech. Well I'm sorry, but that's got nothing to do with anything. If you use a system, you abide by the rules of that system, and if they change, you change with them or you try and change them back or you leave. It's really that simple. Lord knows that there are enough other places to go and play.

LJ isn't saying much/anything on the home page as far as I can tell, but I'll be interested to see if they make their stance clear. If I find out I'll post if - if you find out first, leave me a comment.

Well, here's a thing. A new library is opening in Arizona and the Dewey system gets shelved. Apparently they think their users are going to be too thick to work out how to find books using Dewey, so they're going to take the approach of Borders. Their books will be organised into about 50 sections, then subsections (sounds a bit like Dewey to me!). The thing that made me laugh was that a book on the Civil War would be located in the history neighbourhood (oh dear God... they're going to have neighbourhoods?) AND in the US section. Yes, all well and good... but what if they only have one copy of the book?

Rather than assume their users are thick, might it not be a good idea to try and work out why they don't get users, or ways in which they can encourage users to use catalogues and suchlike? Trying to become Borders is such a bad idea because Borders is a book. shop. You go there to buy. books. You go to a library for rather different reasons. I feel really sorry for my American librarian friends at the moment... I suspect that they may well be cringing...

All useful stuff, but it still reads like 'We're at the top of the mountain and graciously throwing tidbits down at you'. Although they talk about interaction and wanting to hear from librarians, I still don't see it. But maybe I'm just a grouch.